I figured I’d put all my cards on the table and write this up so people have an idea of where we are planning on going this year.Nothing here is set in stone as things are constantly changing. A project I might have been gung-ho about this week might be something that has to be put on the backburner next week because some incident occurs resulting in focus being diverted to fixing said incident. Or the project lead for something might have IRL issues and need to go on hiatus for a few weeks. Et cetera. However, this is the general idea for what I want to do going into 2019. p.s. apologies to @Treshure for being uppity myself when I initially posted this ahead of schedule.

Spoiler

Inside Flam’s Mind - 2019

My mindset for lore is that lore should not exist simply to exist and/or shouldn’t exist simply to give a small group something. All playable or interactable lore should have something for the majority. A playable creature should be built in a way where it grants other players cool and interesting encounters. Magics should also bring things to the table in a similar manner. No pure combat magics should exist that do not also have an aspect to it that creates RP. Aesthetic pets are fine to an extent, but we don’t need 30 different kinds if they aren’t bringing something else to the table. They should all have some kind of playability outside of their aesthetic nature.

Technology/Techlock

The techlock needs clarifying. This should have been done the moment that the techlock was conceived by whoever came up with it. Instead, we’ve spent a handful of years with a vague notion of what isn’t allowed which leads to a lot of arguments on what is allowed if that thing does not blatantly break the techlock.

The first step here is going to be clarifying what technology does exist on LotC. This’ll be done in different chunks. For example, we’ll clarify what is currently possible in terms of medicine, medical practices, tools, et cetera. A number of people seem to think we have modern day tools or surgery practices with no real risk for infection, which might be true if you’re using magic, but a regular surgery would have plenty of risk if you’re not careful.

I want to say that this could be given a priority, but that isn’t possible. There is plenty of lore that is implemented that is causing issues, which we need to focus on first before we can focus on technology and improving things. This isn’t to say it won’t be worked on, but the rate at which it is won’t be expedited. I intend to have this started around March, once the January/February projects are completed (described at the bottom).

Playable Creatures

As I mentioned in my previous announcements, we’re currently developing a creature tier list to help organize the creatures. More powerful creatures will be placed in the higher tiers, but with that will come strict requirements. In order to be a higher tier creature, it must be thoroughly fleshed out in any potential way that can be seen in RP. More information will be included in the creature tier thread when it is ready. I have a preliminary draft done, but it still needs fleshing out by the LT.

We will also be doing a final sweep through creatures to patch some of the remaining issues (e.g. fixing the Zar’ei situation), but for the most part we are finished assigning rewrites.

Lore Foundations + Magic

I want to finish the major foundation rewrites in the next few months. My goal is to have feedback chats for the void and deity rework up by the end of February. Once that is done, we will start discussions on how to rework the magics that fall under the two categories.

The current mindset of the administration is that we want to cut down on the amount of magics we have and set up a solid core group of magics. This doesn’t mean we’ll axe a majority of the magics, but I will be looking to consolidate a number of them. How this will be done will be determined during our talks with the community. I intend to have some of the LT draft up a few methods of doing so (e.g. creating schools of magic and merging magics together that match thematically while altering them to match the newly made schools or merging magics together that make sense to merge and leaving it at that).

We will still be moving forward with the mindset of limiting the combat potential in magic (e.g. removing the large spells that can take out crowds) while buffing the non-combat potential in order to encourage creativity. This does not mean that combat magics will be rendered useless, but there will no longer be one man armies or one shot magics allowed.

p.s. Yes I’m aware the lore section of the forum is messy at the moment, it’ll be cleaned up once the librarians finish some stuff. In addition, the magic app section is undergoing some organization at the moment to help people find CAs vs MAs easier, as some folks have complained about the two being mixed before.

Indexes (Creatures/Plants/Potions)

The index is something that will open up later in the month probably, but for now we don’t need new creatures or plants or potions. We have dozens upon dozens of existing pieces to work with already and I want to adapt them for 7.0.

What we are currently doing is making edits to the current index entries that have issues and scrapping/accepting the rest. The edits being made are for creatures or plants that have minor issues, but otherwise meet the criteria we are looking for.

Creatures/plants should have some kind of playability aspect to them outside of aesthetics and should be written for the map rather than for a person. A pet that is cute and tameable is cool, but once we have 30+ of them that are all written for individuals, it starts to overwhelm things. If you wrote up creatures that are purely aesthetic, there is a chance that they will be shelved. Do not worry though, you can resubmit with added changes (e.g. changing an aesthetic dog so that it now has fur that can be used for x and some other aspect that feeds into the playability side of things).

Combat mounts will probably be nerfed across the board so we don’t have 7+ ft. wolves running around killing people in one bite and will instead be more matched to a war horse. If you want a combative mount, it will need to be balanced (e.g. if you want it to be able to cause good damage, it needs solid weaknesses and can’t be built like a tank).

We will also be releasing guidelines/rules for RP’ing a companion creature or special mount.

World Lore

Last year we cut out a decent amount of useless world lore, but we still have some way to go before world lore is looking good. This year I want world lore to grow rather than be cut though, so one of the early projects after 7.0 will be working to clean up world lore and write in additions for world lore.

Implementation-wise, a fair portion of our world lore just sits there, so my goal for the stuff that is written is for it to have decent playability and event potential. We should be able to drop it into a place in the map with no issue and be able to use it to create RP if people are interested in it. Most world lore, unless it deals with history or things of that nature, should be integrated into the current map in some way, otherwise it's failing to contribute to LotC and thus is not needed.

In an attempt to complete the following, we have a resource node system currently drafted up that is in the final stages of being tweaked. The current one is geared for metals/ores/things of that nature, but will serve as an outline for how we will handle resource nodes for other types of world lore.

January/February

January’s focus will be on 7.0, alchemy, the creature tier list/wrapping up our sweep through creatures, finishing up transfering lore to the wiki, and releasing our lore submission rules/guide. Aside from 7.0, the projects here are either well on their way or in their final stages.

February’s focus will be on completing the voidal and deity foundation reworks, finalizing our edits made to the creatures/plants/potions within our indexes and getting those onto the wiki, setting up resource nodes for 7.0, formatting/beautifying our lore on the wiki and establishing better hub pages for lore, and writing up new world lore pieces to fill in the gaps.

Final Notes

Overall I am optimistic for this year and believe we will be able to structure lore a lot further and get to adding things that we didn’t have before in order to flesh things out. If 2018 revolved around axing a lot of lore, 2019 will be a year where we create order amongst what is left and start filling in the gap with new and improved pieces.

We have a long way to go before lore on LotC is cohesive and works well, but I am confident this will be a great year for getting that done.